Bad Girls (5 page)

They were waiting for him in the main living room, Carmen pacing up and down, a tigress strapped into Louboutin spike heels, which clicked up and down the slate floor, sounding like a whip-fast game of speed chess. She was dressed to the nines, as always, in a red tailored Roland Mouret dress that flamed gloriously against her dark golden Latina skin. Her blue-black hair was curled into loose ringlets down her back, and her makeup was impeccable; she carried a professional Smashbox case in her Range Rover at all times for touch-ups. If you didn’t know that Carmen was one of the top three publicists in this town, that she ruled it with an iron fist in a clanking iron glove, you would have realized it as soon as you met her.

But you certainly wouldn’t have identified the tiny, almost frail girl curled up on the huge white suede sofa as one of the most successful movie actresses of the moment. Jennifer Downs had just come off the set of her latest film, a thriller in which she played an LAPD detective who, while investigating a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes, was conducting torrid affairs with two separate men, both of whom were suspects in the case. In order to lend Jennifer’s fragile build and doe-eyed features a tougher edge, which would make casting her as a hard-bitten detective remotely plausible, her light brown hair had been given a short, shaggy crop. Her skin was bare, without a scrap of makeup, and she was wearing soft, fleecy sweats and flip-flops which were specially engineered to prevent cellulite. She looked ten years younger than her true age, which was twenty-five. This was partly because she was underweight, which made her eyes look as huge as headlights in her small heart-shaped face.

‘Hey, ladies!’ Joe said easily as he strolled into the living room. Estrelita had met him at the door with a cold Bud, and he tilted it to his lips, relishing the clean sharp taste of the chilled lager, the bubbles popping on his tongue.

He was hoping against hope that this wasn’t a biggie. And then he noticed the magazine on the huge glass coffee table, and his heart sank right down to the floor.

Oh boy, I’m in trouble now, he thought ruefully.

‘You’re an idiot!’ Jennifer said furiously, glaring at him. ‘A stupid fucking idiot
dickhead
who can’t keep it in his pants for more than two fucking seconds at a time!’

‘Careful, honey,’ Joe said, drinking some more Bud. ‘Your personality is showing.’

Jennifer would have burned holes in him with her stare if she could.

Carmen swung to a halt, swivelled, and pointed one red-tipped, perfectly manicured finger at him.

‘She’s on the money,’ Carmen hissed. ‘You
are
a fucking idiot.’

‘Wow, you’re taking her side. No surprises there,’ Joe commented ironically.

He walked over to the built-in wet bar, where Estrelita had set out his snack, beautifully arranged in a huge bone china dish: in the centre was blue cheese dressing, dusted with freshly ground white pepper. Sticks of celery and carrot rested on one side, and a stack of his favourite Doritos on the other.

‘Yay! Cool Ranch Doritos! Estrelita’s the best!’ Joe said, dunking a chip into the whipped dressing. ‘Ladies? Chip and dip?’

As he’d known they would, both Carmen and Jennifer recoiled as if he’d offered them arsenic laced with weedkiller.

‘Oh, yeah, sorry, Jen. Forgot you don’t eat solid food on weekdays,’ he said cheerfully.

‘God, I hate you sometimes,’ Jennifer said, turning away so she didn’t have to watch him eat. She looked to the left, not because she wanted to examine the Roy Lichtenstein painting of the cartoon woman firing a ray gun, the words ‘BANG! ZAP! KAPOW!’ exploding above her head, for which Joe’s designer had paid tens of millions of dollars; no, Jennifer always automatically turned to the left, because she knew how perfect her profile was from that side.

‘Is that
cheese
?’ Carmen asked, horrified.

‘Sure is,’ Joe confirmed.

‘He’s
so
freaking lucky not to be lactose intolerant,’ Jennifer sighed.

‘He should be
allergic
to
strippers
!’ Carmen yelled, getting right back to the point, batting aside Joe’s attempt to distract her. ‘Look at that fucking magazine cover!’

Fortified now with beer and Doritos, Joe strolled over to the coffee table. It was one huge slab of glass, six feet long and two feet high, with artfully rough edges, stacked with two perfect piles of the latest sports and cigar magazines. And tossed right in the centre was the latest issue of the
National Investigator
, a blurred picture on its cover of a woman sitting on the lap of a man, another woman lying beside them, her legs draped elegantly up a pole. Over the photo, in bright yellow, deliberately obscuring much of it so that readers would have to buy the issue to look inside, blared the head-line:‘JOE CHEATS ON JEN WITH STRIPPER!’

‘Hey, I wonder how much time they put into thinking that headline up,’ Joe said, uncapping a second beer. ‘You think they worked all night to come up with something that catchy?’

Carmen froze him with a glare colder than his bottle of Bud. ‘Cut the crap, Joe,’ she snapped.

Joe sighed. ‘OK, I’m holding my hands up,’ he said, suiting the action to the words. ‘I fucked up. I’m really sorry. Can you fix this, Carmen? Stage me apologizing to Jen, or something? Say it was my early bachelor party?’

‘You
agreed
to this whole deal, Joe,’ Carmen said, flicking a cigarette out of the pack of Merits that lay on the table, and lighting up. ‘We went over and over it, remember? You needed an image makeover. There were too many George Clooney-type stories about you being an eternal bachelor. People speculating all over the Internet that you were gay.’

Joe couldn’t help smirking at that one.

‘Hey, being a pussy-hound who can’t stay away from cheap whores is almost as bad as being a faggot for the movie-going public!’ Carmen hissed, firing smoke out of both her nostrils like a glamorous dragon.

Jennifer nodded vigorously, reaching for the Merits herself.

‘It looks
terrible
,’ she chimed in. ‘You
know
how important the women’s magazines are. I mean, if you were serial dating, that’s one thing. But
strip clubs
. . .’

‘You’re thirty-five, Joe,’ Carmen said coldly. ‘You can’t keep playing the playboy card.’

Hell, I know she’s right, Joe thought gloomily, snagging a piece of celery and dragging it through the dip. That’s why we cooked up this whole engagement crap in the first place. Jennifer and I, we both needed to get married. Shoot a romantic comedy together, say we fell in love on set, sell the hell out of the movie, get married on a Malibu clifftop, stay together for a few years, see how it goes . . .

That’s why the rendezvous with the paparazzi had been set up by Carmen’s assistant today; candid shots of him with his dogs, to publicize the movie he and Jen were starring in, which was due to be released in a couple of months’ time. It was an adaptation of a best-selling memoir called
Me, Him and Mr Paws
, about feuding neighbours who have to put aside their differences to look after a cute chow puppy that gets dumped on their doorstep. Jennifer played the uptight career woman, Joe the laid-back commitment-phobe, drawn to each other despite themselves. It was going to make everyone involved a shitload of money.

Joe being photographed taking his dogs for a run was perfect prerelease publicity. Or it had been, until that damn gossip rag had screwed up all their carefully laid plans.

‘This is going to need really serious damage control,’ Carmen pronounced, staring hard at Joe, her black eyes shiny and hard as rifle casings.

‘Stage a really big apology?’ Joe offered weakly, finishing his second beer. ‘I mean, I just wrapped a movie, I was celebrating with a couple of consenting adults . . . Could I sweep Jen off to Venice for the weekend or something? Make some huge romantic gesture? Buy her some of Liz Taylor’s diamonds?’

Carmen laughed hollowly. Jen, sitting up straight on the sofa, feet curled under her, shook her head.

‘Joe, they’ve got a lot of photos,’ Carmen informed him. ‘There’s a whole series of one of the girls going down on you.’

Joe pulled an agonized face. ‘That’s not good,’ he said feebly.

Hengist and Horsa, who had padded off into the kitchen to drink some water, re-emerged and flopped down in the marble-tiled hallway, which didn’t get the sun and therefore was the coolest place in the entire house. Their heavy tails pounded a few times before they settled down for a nice long nap, breathing heavily and sighing to each other.

‘You’re addicted,’ Jennifer said.

‘Say what?’ Joe spun round to look at her.

‘You’re
addicted
,’ she said, eyes wide, her photogenic face composed into the precise expression of utter conviction that had appeared on all the posters for her movie last year,
Saving Susan
, in which she’d played a nun battling to prevent her drug-addicted sister from being convicted of killing her abusive husband.

‘You’re a sex addict,’ Carmen confirmed. ‘You just can’t stay away from strippers. It’s a disease. Which means it’s not your fault. Neat, huh! I’ve set it all up. You make a huge apology to Jen, then you go into Cascabel for a few weeks for a residential stay. Work through the programme, Jen meets you when you get discharged, you have a reunion, she falls into your arms, you promise to be good, the movie premieres, you two lovebirds get married. The End.’

‘Cascabel? That’s a
rehab clinic
!’ Joe protested. He really wanted another beer, but three in a row, this fast . . . Even if he’d just finished a movie, that wasn’t such a good idea. He tried the yoga breathing that one of his trainers swore by; pulling right up from his gut, in through the nose, out down his shoulder blades. It just made him feel dizzy.

‘It’s very plush,’ Carmen assured him. ‘You can have a private room. There’s a pool, the food’s great . . . think of it as a country club.’

‘Or a health spa,’ Jennifer chimed in, shooting a pointed look at the empty bottles of beer and the chip-and-dip plate on the wet bar. ‘You might even shed a few pounds.’

‘Look, you little bitch!’ Joe said angrily, taking a couple of steps towards her. ‘You need this goddamn wedding more than I do! So I like to party with strippers every now and then – what man doesn’t? And maybe some of the women who see those pictures will turn their noses up, but I tell you, the guys are thinking, Good for Joe!’

‘Endorsements,’ Carmen chanted. ‘Commercials in Japan.’

‘Yeah, yeah, Carmen, I
know
, OK? I know I need to watch my rep! That’s why, when you pitched it to me, I agreed to marry your
girlfriend
, OK?’ Joe stormed over to the bar, slammed open the Sub-Zero and grabbed himself another cold one. ‘So don’t make it like I need you more than you need me! Jodie Foster, Portia de Rossi – the celebrity rug-munchers aren’t exactly racking up the nominations or the big bucks, are they? You thought it was too dangerous to set Jennifer up with a gay guy, ’cause if that blows up in your face, everyone looks bad! Oh no, you wanted
me
! I’m the big score, ’cause everyone knows damn well that I’m as straight as Sean mother-fucking Penn!’

‘Ew, that
animal
,’ Jennifer muttered.

‘So don’t play this like I’m the total fuckup here!’ Joe looked at the beer, swore in fury, and slammed it down, unopened, on the granite surface of the bar. ‘I can’t believe I’m pounding the beers like this!
Man
, you got me all wound up!’

‘You should switch to low-carb,’ Jennifer offered.

‘Tastes like shit,’ Joe said gloomily, sinking down in one of the big leather recliners and kicking out the footrest. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. ‘I’m fucked, aren’t I? These pictures, coming out before
Mr Paws
. . . ugh, I’m sorry, Jen.’ He looked directly at his fiancée, the whites of his eyes a little red now, but their bright candid blue as clear and charming as ever. ‘And I’m sorry I called you two rug-munchers,’ he added to placate a fuming Carmen. ‘It’s not like I don’t like a pussy appetizer myself.’

‘
Please
.’ Jen rolled her huge, beautiful eyes. ‘Like I care what you do in bed.’

Carmen stalked across the room, round the back of the sofa, to lean down and wrap her arms around Jennifer’s neck. Jennifer turned to kiss her lover’s cheek lightly.

‘You know how this looks, Joe,’ Carmen said, calming down as Jennifer reached up to stroke one of her ringlets. ‘Like Jennifer’s a total patsy for staying with you. This wasn’t just getting drunk in a bar, letting off steam by flirting with some girls. This was getting blown by a stripper.’

‘She was a nice chick,’ Joe muttered. ‘We all had a good time.’

‘I can stage all the apologies I want, but this is the worst time possible. Your movie’s coming out . . . it could tank Jen’s career if she doesn’t dump you. She’s supposed to be a strong modern role model! Strong modern role models don’t stick with guys who cheat on them!’

‘Ah,
fuck
,’ Joe said, once again, the weight of what Carmen was saying slowly sinking in. ‘I’ve got no choice, do I?’

The two women shook their heads in unison.

‘I’ve booked you into Cascabel from tomorrow,’ Carmen said. ‘And I’m putting out a press statement from the both of you. I’ve got the first draft for you to look at.’

With increasing misery, Joe began to realize what was in store for him over the coming month, which he had planned to spend chilling out, catching up on his TV shows – there was a boxed set of
The Wire
he’d been dying to get to – having his stuntmen buddies round to shoot some pool, calling up some girls to come over and party. Relaxing his rigid diet and exercise schedule, just enough to make him feel like a man, not a performing animal on a treadmill. Hanging out with Hengist and Horsa, throwing Frisbees for them on the lawn, taking them for runs; their company was the best tonic he knew. Just now, one of them was snoring lightly, which normally would have made him chuckle with amusement.

‘God
damn it
,’ Joe said with such deep feeling that both dogs woke, looking up to see what was wrong with their beloved human. Hengist clambered to his feet and lumbered over to Joe, shoving his damp nose into Joe’s hand for comfort.